Swapfile for my brain

RailsConf 2008

matt — Sun, 01 Jun 2008 00:17:36 +0000

In Portland, Oregon all this weekend for RailsConf 2008, any like-minded readers interested in chatting over a beer?I gave a lightning talk on rubber today, if anyone wangts a more detailed demo, seek me out (twitter: mattconway).

Replacing AppleScript with Ruby

matt — Thu, 29 May 2008 23:24:14 +0000

I had a brief run-in with AppleScript trying to overcome an OS X terminal bug. and its not something I enjoyed. I would much rather be able to do scripts like this in a language I’m more comfortable in like ruby. I’ve known for a while that one of the enhancements in OS X Leopard is that it has native support for scripting the UI from within other scripting languages like python and ruby, however, I didn’t realize that I could drop those scripts in the user scripts folder (~/Library/Scripts) and have them available from the scripts toolbar icon. (more…)

Capistrano and ssh connection limit

matt — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 19:44:49 +0000

We use capistrano to deploy our rails applications from a subversion repository that is accessed using svn+ssh. Recently we ran into a problem where Capistrano was unable to connect to subversion from some of the deployment hosts with an error like:

*** [err :: host.domain.com] ssh_exchange_identification: Connection closed by remote host

Since capistrano tries to fire off N svn checkouts simultaneously, it was running into a connection limit for ssh on the the subversion server. Turns out there is a MaxStartups setting for sshd_config which effectively determines how many clients can be trying to connect simultaneously. It defaults to 10, and our failures started happening when we went above 10. Changing the value to 50 on our svn/ssh server cleared up the problem.

Client for nettica dns service

matt — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 00:12:13 +0000

One of the drawbacks of EC2 is that there are no static IPs to be had, so short of using an external (to ec2) solution, the only way to have redundant load balancers is to use dns round robin. If a load balancer instance goes down, we should ideally remove it from the round robin so that clients don’t continue to use the dead IP.

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Deploying Rails Apps to EC2 with Capistrano

matt — Mon, 28 Jan 2008 23:30:52 +0000

I’ve created yet another system for deploying rails apps to ec2 using capistrano. None of the others were doing it for me, primarily because I needed a way to deploy/configure/scale-up to multiple instances as needed.
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Using Capistrano without source control

matt — Sun, 27 Jan 2008 06:27:11 +0000

I’m in the process of writing some capistrano recipes to make deploying to Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (ec2) easier. Since I’m making this project available for general consumption, I wanted a way to make it easy for someone to try it out without having to check something into source control. (more…)

Mounting Xen DomU LVM disk in Dom0

matt — Sun, 27 Jan 2008 05:57:44 +0000

I setup a xen based system for our production environment at work. I’m using LVM throughout for all the benefits it provides (resizing, snapshot backups, etc). Each domU gets its own logical volume on dom0’s volume group. This logical volume actually looks like an entire physical disk to the domU, and the domU then further partitions it into a boot partition and a nested LVM partition (swap + root fs). Aren’t the layers of unix file abstractions a thing of beauty to behold?

In retrospect I probably should have mapped LVM logical volumes direct from dom0 as partitions in domU rather than having domU add the extra LVM layer on top - though reading around shows that this _may_ not be supported in the future, so… (more…)

Wireless Shenanigans

matt — Sat, 22 Sep 2007 03:35:53 +0000

To date, my wireless setup at home consists of 2 linksys WRT54Gs modded with the OpenWRT firmware + x-wrt (webif2) for a better web ui. One of these routers serves as my gateway/firewall and the other connects my upper floors to the gateway via WDS (basically, its only there so my Series-1 Tivo can get online as the only mod I have for it is a wired ethernet card I also have a server (mythtv) which connects to my gateway via an ethernet cable cleverly hidden under a rug between the living room and study. Something my wife isn’t too happy with!
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Create your own ringtone

matt — Wed, 12 Sep 2007 23:03:23 +0000

We just added a cool feature called Make My Ringtone, where you can turn any MP3 file into a custom ringtone for your phone. It’s free, easy to use, and works on all major U.S. carriers including Verizon.

To check it out,
1. Go to www.mobicious.com/ringtones/new
2. Select an MP3 file from your desktop
3. Choose and preview any 20 second clip
4. Send your custom ringtone to your mobile phone

Camping for an iPhone

matt — Fri, 29 Jun 2007 20:05:15 +0000

Yes, I actually am - I think this is the first tme I have ever camped for anything. Not sure if one can call sitting in line for 3 hours “camping”, but is as close as I’ll ever come

For those nearby - the AT&T store on Needham St in Needham MA, only has abou 40 people in line.